


The Sound of Silence

by UntilDawnClimbingClass



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Death, Haunted Houses, Horror, Murder, Supernatural - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-03 17:25:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15823542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UntilDawnClimbingClass/pseuds/UntilDawnClimbingClass
Summary: It’s been five years since everyone’s last encounter with the Upside Down. Things have been as normal as they could be for a while now. Most of the gang has gone off to college. Joyce and Hopper married and Eleven has learned what it’s like to have a real family. Things were good.But suddenly Eleven is caught up in grisly murders, stranger creatures, and it all has to do with this one woman and her houses where people don’t seem to survive in.There’s something sinister in town, a new evil, and nothing is normal anymore.





	The Sound of Silence

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys.
> 
> I’ve been away for a while. I won’t get into why, but things have been extremely tough and I’ve been spending months trying to get better and pick myself up. 
> 
> I know most people prefer stories that revolve around relationships, but I decided to try to write a horror story that doesn’t really focus on relationships. Not all characters will appear in this story. This is mostly focused around Eleven. 
> 
> I promise I will update my mother stories. I swear. I don’t know when, but soon. As of right now this story is complete and I want to get this out there.

Eleven’s been scared before. The Upside Down still gives her terrible nightmares that have her screaming in the middle of the night, even though it’s been five years without any incident. 

She still remembers being locked in that room, begging, screaming, clawing at the walls so hard her fingers bled.

And she’s scared now, watching them pound the ghastly  **For Sale** sign in by the house that was across from the her home.

She couldn’t tell you what's wrong with that house. She could tell you about the noises she hears in the middle of the night when the neighborhood should be asleep, the low moaning like creaking walls, the barking no dog could ever make. How the wind echoes through the trees on that lot, the way her footsteps sound on the sidewalk as she walks past it. She could tell you about the smell, like dust and lavender, and under it all the enduring sense of decay that delves deep into the timbers of old houses. Sure, she could tell you about the shiver that runs down her spine every time she walks past the place, and the feeling like eyes burrowing into the back of her head, and the cold…

But she won't.

She doesn’t need to tell you. You'll see for yourself before the end.

* * *

 

Will says that he’s known his neighbor, Dana Robbins, for all the years they’ve lived in the same neighborhood. He laughed when Eleven pointed out everything Dana’s done to the house—how the siding came loose at the same time Robbins should have been getting her first wrinkle, and the shingles lost their color when her hair might have turned gray. The windows faded beside her eyesight. And now, when the house is looking like a woman of centuries, Dana doesn't look a day over thirty.   
  
Of course, Will laughs. At least, he did, right up until the body of Nick Walsh turned up in Dana’s yard, mauled and mutilated, surrounded by paw prints that looked far too much like human hands.   
  
Eleven doesn’t know what the investigation into the boy ever found. She just remembers sitting out on the front lawn, watching for hours as Dana walked round and round her yard, not touching anything, just staring at it like she'd never seen her house before. She didn't take care of her house, and wouldn't stand for other people offering to. Eleven remembers when Hopper offered to apply a fresh coat of paint to her siding, and she'd turned six shades of gray. Maybe she’s just a little off.

But that doesn't explain everything, and it sure doesn't explain the bodies.

People were turning up dead in all different places in the small town of Hawkins. And not just dead: decapitated, dismembered, shredded like paper. And-now listen carefully, Eleven knows this because she overheard Joyce and Hopper talking about it after Hopper did a lot of investigating—the bodies only showed up at houses where Dana used to live.   
  
Sure, it sounds crazy. To anyone who doesn't know better, it sounds impossible. One woman, barely thirty years old, has lived in three different houses around the area for fifty years each? But that's not the worst. No, not by a long run.   
  
Because Dana’s lived in twelve different houses over the years. That's right: six hundred years, she's been moving, leaving her houses fall into amazing states of disrepair, but moving on in her eternal youth. And each time she leaves, you know what happens? Of course you do. Some new people move in, and they start fixing things up. And then they die.   
  
Joyce is scared this has something to do with the Upside Down. Scared to the point where she’s ready to pack up and leave with her children. 

Hopper says they’re dealing with something completely different here. Nothing they’ve ever seen before.

Something far more sinister.  

Eleven’s done some digging herself about Dana and found information in legal records, in diaries, from Dana Robbins herself. Her search has taken her months, and in that time she’s uncovered things that leave her awake at night.

Eleven had lived a semi-normal life for five  years, has learned to control her powers much better and hasn’t felt the need to use them as much. She hasn’t had to. But there’s a new evil in town and she the semi-normal life she was living for five years is over. 

Because there's another house for sale. Dana’s going to move on, suck the life out of a new house, and let the house suck the life out of its next owner. That's how it's been for six centuries, that's how it will be forever.   
  
_ Thud, scrape, thud, scrape _ . It sounds like men digging a grave. But they aren't. They're putting up the  **For Sale** sign in front of the thirteenth house of Dana Robbins.   
  
To calm her nerves, Eleven decided to go on a bike ride. No destination in mind, really, but after a half hour of riding, she realizes  where it is she’s about to end up. A house built in 1860–by one Dana Robbins.   
  
Though both Joyce and Hopper have warned her and Will to stay away from the houses until they figure out how to deal with this, she’s been here before, though not quite this early in the morning, and not on such a cloudy day. A bit of heat lightning snakes across the sky above the caving roof. The house hasn't been repaired since a few years after Dana  lived there, at least not that she can tell, and the walls look like they're about to buckle. There's still a single blue shudder clinging to one of the front windows, and as she walks past the wind bangs it against the house.   
  
Eleven wishes she knew what exactly happened to the people who bought this house from Dana, but the public library only keeps records through 1926. They must have died soon after their purchase. Looking through the glass windows, she can see why: the rooms have layers of beautiful hand-painted wall-paper, something Dana never would have bought. Improvements made by the new owners, then, and little did they know...they might as well have used coffin linings.   
  
She parks her bike out in back by the run-down shed and tries the front door. It isn't locked. Strange, because she distinctly remembers locking it behind her last time she left, about six months ago...but maybe some other kids found the house and dared each other to spend the night in it, or something else stupid. She looks down at the floor, through the layers of dust. Her footprints are there, and hand prints from when she tried to pry up the floorboards looking for a way downstairs. Though she doesn’t remember trying in quite so many places. Strange. 

The stairs are right to her left, covered in heavily worn green carpet, with regular red splotches that look like small puddles of blood. There's a large golden mirror on the second-story landing, with a large crack down the middle, which she widened considerably on her last visit by falling down the second flight of stairs.

She moves on to the third floor.

It's up here that things start to get interesting. She doesn’t know if the library was Dana’s or her buyer's, but it fills most of the top story. The shelves are the floor-to-ceiling kind you can only find in really old libraries, complete with a rolling ladder to reach the books on top. She climbs the ladder now, testing each rung to see if it will hold her weight. It won't. One of the rungs breaks off in her hand, and she drops back to the persian rug on the floor.

Eleven leaves the library and goes to the other room on the third floor, but it’s empty now. She thinks it was a bedroom. This room is the darkest in the house, because the crown of the maple tree in the side yard blocks the only window. She walks in carefully. This is the room that reminds her most of Dana, because it has her smell: lavender, very faint, but strong enough to cover the dust. She goes over to stand beside the window when she hears a noise.   
  
It isn't the sort you can expect from an old house, and trust her on that, She’s an expert by now. It sounds almost animal, like a wolf growling low in its throat. She turns slowly, but she has nothing to worry about: from this room, she can see the entire third story landing and the door to the library. Anything that might be in this house will have to get past her.

_ You and what army? _ That's a phrase she learned from Mike. Mike, who was currently away at college while she was still here in this town. She misses him to the point where it hurts. She misses all her friends. They were all still very close, but everyone but her had their own lives now. Jonathan and Nancy were getting married. Her friends were all away at college. Steve still lives in town, taking over his father’s business. He and Billy Hargrove live together. Eleven doesn’t know how that happened and she hasn’t asked.

Will is still here, though, deciding to take a year off before going to school, and that counts for something. At least she has her brother. Everyone checks in when they can, but it’s not the same and she hates it. She wishes they were kids again.

Eleven hears the noise again, breaking her out of her thoughts, and this time, she can tell for sure that it's some kind of animal. But the tapping on the stairs, that's definitely human.

"Hello?"   
  
No one answers, but the climbing stops, and she hears the growling coming from far closer than it was before. "Hello?" She calls softly again, stepping towards the door. "Is...someone here—?” She breaks off in a scream, tripping out onto the landing. Because she heard the wolf-noise again, and this time, it was coming from right behind her.    
  
There's a gray shape in the bedroom, too dark for her to make out, except for its paws...or hands, she should say. Little black hands, with long nails like claws, but certainly human. She cries out and runs down the stairs, no longer caring about whoever was in the house with her because she knows, for sure, that it's no one she wants to know.   
  
She doesn’t stop running until she reaches her bike, and her heart is pounding so hard that it may burst in her chest. There are strange prints in the dirt around her bike-the dry dirt-with a human palm and deep, deep nail marks at the ends. And by the time the creature barks for the fourth time, she’s shaking so hard she doesn’t even care.   
  
"Shut up, I'm going!" She shouts. "Shut up, shut up! I'm going!"   
  
"Good," a voice says, too cold to be either male or female. "And don't come back."


End file.
